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German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945

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German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 German Cinema—Terror And Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945. Thomas Elsaesser. London, New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 352 (cloth). Reviewed by Angelos Koutsourakis, University of New South Wales The Problem with this Civilization is that it does not have an alternative to Auschwitz.1 In 1966, aged 21, Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote a play entitled Nur eine Scheibe Brot (Just a Slice of Bread). The play consists of ten scenes and tells the story of a young man, Fricke, who wants to make a film about Auschwitz that does not comply with the official post-war Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) narrative on the events. The main character is afraid of spectacularising and trivialising such a sensitive issue without offering any insights into the causes that made the Holocaust happen. He is more inclined to make a film which acknowledges the limits of representation. Eventually, he succumbs to the temptation to produce an object which is based upon all the conventional, emotional clichés that one can identify in contemporary films on the subject; not surprisingly he receives public praise and a number of Federal prizes. Fassbinder’s play proleptically addresses some of the key points raised later by Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel, who reacted against the “trivialisation of memory” in mainstream cinema’s portrayals of the concentration camps.2 David Barnett has brilliantly captured the complexity of the play: Although Fassbinder was still young and inexperienced at the time of writing, the play approaches the subject of the Holocaust from a surprisingly mature perspective and asks the question of how one represents the unrepresentable. He points to the difficulties of opening up highly sensitive subject matters to unorthodox modes of depiction in order to circumvent official standpoints. He also draws our attention to the material problems involved in making a film about Auschwitz in 1 Heiner Müller, Plays, Poetry, Prose, trans. Carl Weber (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 151. 2 Elie Wiesel, “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory,” New York Times, 11 June 1989. Affirmations: of the modern 2.1 Winter 2014 156 Affirmations 2.1 which actors treat the job just as any other. While there are moments in the play that make it very much of its time, such as the generational clash between the idealistic Fricke and his uncle, Herr Baumbach, the aesthetic questions raised by the play remain current.3 Fassbinder’s early and undeservedly overlooked play synopsises some of the representational questions tackled by the major filmmakers of the New German Cinema, who aimed to deal with the Holocaust and the traumas of fascism in ways that would not necessarily provide triumphalist declarations of reconciliation and facile therapeutic formulas for victims and perpetrators. This preamble sets the context for discussing Thomas Elsaesser’s outstanding new book, German Cinema—Terror And Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945. The book reconsiders the impact of the Holocaust and its afterlife in post-war German films dealing with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) and rethinks trauma theory in light of the current European culture of historical commemoration. The merit of this book is its strong historical vantage point, which does not treat the objects under discussion as museum pieces, but convincingly demonstrates their capacity to gain renewed significance and to produce diverse hermeneutical conundrums in different historical contexts/periods. Let us start by unfolding the book’s major theoretical standpoints. In the first section, titled “Terror, Trauma, Parapraxis,” Elsaesser articulates the ways that trauma theory can offer a pathway to help us understand how sensitive historical incidents, which are entrenched in collective memory, reverberate in the present. He suggests that contemporary traumatic historical phenomena not only force us to look into the past to seek sufficient interpretative schemata, but also redefine and reformulate our relationship with the past. According to Elsaesser, in the present historical period, in which the collective “common projects,” e.g. the struggle for social justice and the desire to change the world, are notably absent, shared traumatic memories from the past and the present remain (problematically) the sole collective narratives which can establish a group identity. But what renders historical events such as the Holocaust, and the 3 David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 247. Reviews 157 emergence of radical leftist groups such as the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), which reacted against the historical amnesia of the Wirtschaftswunder (the German economic miracle) and the smooth reintegration of former Nazis in politics and public offices, is their “afterlife” in the present. This afterlife creates fragmented continuities between the past and the present which showcase Europe’s inability to come to terms with the past (I will return to this later on). A key term in Elsaesser’s conceptual repertoire is the Freudian term Fehlleistung, translated in English as parapraxis. It is his contention that in our engagement with moving images, parapraxis can produce “both a politics (in public life, the spheres of political action) and a poetics (manifest in literature, the cinema and other spheres of symbolic action).”4 Elsaesser brings examples from politicians’ faux pas in anniversaries of commemoration, such as Ronald Reagan’s and Helmut Kohl’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery, where Reagan compared the buried Waffen-SS with the victims of the Holocaust. The “failed performance” of this visit was strengthened by the fact that a visit to a concentration camp was added later (this is not mentioned in Elsaesser’s book) “to ensure parity (!)”5 and this provoked one of the major Jewish protests in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD). Yet Elsaesser also identifies similar “failed performances” (the literal translation of Freud’s Fehlleistungen) on the part of the Left. A compelling example is RAF’s distancing of itself from the Täter- Väter (perpetrator-fathers) generation. A crucial aspect of this distancing was their refusal to adapt to the philo-Semite narrative of reconciliation. This was largely deployed by the conservative right as a means of exonerating itself from its own past and from allegations that the political structures which led to the Third Reich were still in place. Was RAF’s support for Palestine and its anti- Zionist rhetoric a symptom of latent fascism or of a broader reaction against the BRD’s collaboration with repressive regimes? Or was it a retroactive revival of the post-Auschwitz collective guilt? Facile answers cannot be offered. This is precisely the merit of Elsaesser’s hermeneutical approach under the rubric of the Fehlleistung, because it allows 4 Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema—Terror And Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), 8. 5 Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 34. 158 Affirmations 2.1 him to point to a series of paradoxes that deny uniform interpretative responses. Such a contradiction is also brought to the fore when he explains how the history of the RAF is directly interrelated with media manipulation, since the radical left-wingers had no scruples in benefitting from the media-effects of “the society of the spectacle” so as to attract public attention and even to parallel the solitary confinement of their members with Auschwitz. In doing so, they aspired to expose the autocratic aspect of the BRD and to revive the ghost of the Endlösung (the final solution), which keeps on haunting Germany to the present, so as to argue that underneath the veneer of liberal democracy, the spectre of fascism was still alive. Elsaesser is adept at showing that this burdened period in European history is an unfinished project, and he keeps on posing questions about the limits of representation when dealing with historical traumas. Then again, films about the Holocaust as well as about the RAF are still produced, and this insistence on commemorating the past might be the index of an inability to master it. Elsaesser makes an important (albeit inferred) periodization; films concerned with Germany’s traumatic past made during the years of the New German cinema differ from contemporary ones such as Rosenstraße (von Trotta: 2003) for two principal reasons. The first is that in the New German cinema there is a distinguishing absence of Jewish figures, while in the latter post-1990s period there is a tendency to focus on positive representations of the Jews. The second reason is that filmmakers like Fassbinder, Farocki, and Kluge were aware of the productive role of Fehlleistungen in representation. Failure to master the past could be a productive way of not foreclosing it and, as Elsaesser points out, these filmmakers deployed “narrative and stylistic devices in order to emphasise achievement and failure, achievement in failure.”6 This periodization can also be explained historically. On the one hand, the New German Cinema filmmakers operated in a period in which political activism was still strong enough, whereas films made in the post-1990s period reflect the shift from politics to “cultural memory.” The question that arises is: does this fixation with commemorating the past help us to comprehend it and avoid similar mistakes, or does it simply reproduce a culture of self-ingratiation? 6 Elsaesser, German Cinema, 25. Reviews
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